Sunday, March 11, 2012

Newhouser Dominates Single-Season Strikeout Lists

In the previous post, I looked at the Tigers career strikeout leaders according to the K+ and Adjusted K statistics. Today, I'll do the same thing for single seasons. Thanks again to Raphy at High Heat Stats for developing the strikeout normalization formulas.

The K+ metric tells us how a pitcher's strikeout total compared to league average. For example, Justin Verlander had a 147 K+ in 2009 which means his strikeout rate was 47% better than league average. His Adjusted K total that year was 187 which is an estimate of his strikeout total assuming that the league average strikeouts per inning was .531 (the
all-time MLB rate). The Adjusted K number doesn't tell us a lot about Verlander in 2009, but it's useful in comparing pitchers across years.

As shown in Table 1 below, the Tigers single-season K+ leader is Hall of Fame left hander Hal Newhouser at 199 in 1946. That means his strikeout rate was about twice as high as the league average that year. Newhouser's 1943 and 1945 seasons rank second and third and his 1944 season was also in the top 15. Other pitchers appearing multiple times are Tommy Bridges (six times between 1931-1943) and Bob Newsom (1941 and 1939).

Table 2 shows that Newhouser also leads with 309 Adjusted K in 1946 and 294 Adjusted K in 1945.Mickey Lolich's 271 Adjusted K in 1971 ranks third. Looking at the entire top 15, Newhouser appears four times and Bridges, Lolich and Newsom two times apiece.